Tennis: Wrexham, for all its undoubted virtues, does not readily conjure up images of the exotic and the far-flung.

The mysterious allure of the Welsh town has not been known to inspire young children to break off from admiring the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and pick up their tennis racquets in the hope of finding themselves, one day, serving for the title in Wrexham.

Still, that corner of north Wales was where four Irish tennis professionals found themselves last weekend before the summer came to an abrupt, sopping close. Wrexham is where they sought to win a little money and some ranking points at the ATP Futures tournament.

As it went, Wrexham was kind to Ireland's highest-ranked professional, Conor Niland, who had a blip during the Davis Cup against Slovenia earlier in the summer in Fitzwilliam but has now followed on from a laudable US college stint to a promising and hopeful professional career.

His path to Wrexham, however, was not textbook. While colleagues Stephen Nugent and James Cluskey fell in the first round after getting entry to the main draw as lucky losers, and Colin O'Brien didn't make it through the qualification, Niland went on to win it.

His 6-4, 2-6, 6-3 win over Italy's Riccardo Ghedin marked the Limerick player's first victory at this level.

While far from the main ATP tour events and even farther from Grand Slam competition, the tournament in Wales is one of the first steps along the long path.

Niland has set a goal of playing in the 2007 Australian Open qualification event and for that his world ranking will probably have to come down to 300. And good old Wrexham has sent him along the way.

"To have won a Futures title by the end of the summer, I would have considered that a good summer," he said yesterday. "It's important to get a run of matches and close them out. It's now a goal of mine to win a Challenger event or get to the later stages of one."

His Wrexham odyssey, however, should never have happened. Hoping to play in a Russian Challenger event - a higher-level tournament than the Futures event - Niland was making his way from Canada to Europe when he discovered the paperwork wasn't quite the whole deal and he couldn't get into Russia. The fallback was to play Wrexham.

He is now back in Ireland before jetting out to Uzbekistan tomorrow for a Challenger event there, and bearing that in mind you can see where the logistical difficulties are in chasing ranking points: Canada, Wales and Uzbekistan in successive weeks.

It's not glamorous. It's chasing tournaments around the world and hoping that injury, food poisoning, political strife and fatigue don't finish you off. It's playing the tournaments that will have you when you are fighting to get to a world ranking of 300 from around 370 (the revised rankings come out each Monday).

Then when the autumn comes and the tournaments begin to dry up, the Challenger events will be harder to come by.

The shrinkage in volume means the cut mark for entry drops from around a ranking of 420 down to 250 and you find that players ranked even as low as 80 or 90 in the world are filling in weeks between bigger events by playing in Challengers, which are a significantly lower level to what they are capable of.

"There have been some complaints to the ATP," he says. "I don't know why it is exactly but there appear to be fewer events. Maybe because it's the winter, there's just less on."

The higher-ranked players can also pick and chose what they play in, which is why Niland travels to eastern Europe, while more illustrious professionals take their places in this week's Challenger events in comfortable Germany.

It's a grind but Niland is prepared for it and has a coach, Shaheen Ladhani, travelling with him. This is about giving it everything for a couple of years and then seeing the lie of the land.

It's about wanting to qualify for the Australian Open in January, about going to Bukhara and being hungry about it rather than teed off, and about winning sleepy $15,000 Futures events in Wrexham.

Putting tennis into some meaningful context

Tennis has always had a problem educating fans about what happens to the sport outside the Grand Slams, when it seems that all the players then scatter around the world and play in random events best suited to their styles and pockets. That is what happens, actually, and it's a confusing system.

In the main sports there are connected events that peak and dip during the year, but in tennis the profile is only of four Grand Slam events and nothing in between.

In America, however, the fight is on, according to Arlen Kantarian, the USTA's chief executive. The first step was getting the men's and women's tours to agree to a coherent six-week build-up to the Open with a predictable schedule (mostly on ESPN2).

Last year, the series also switched to blue courts, providing a better contrast with the ball on TV, and they are now saying sponsors can be signed up for more than just the Open itself. Ratings were up 50 per cent in 2005 over 2004.

"Before there was no context outside the Grand Slams," Kantarian said. "Now people, leading up to the US Open, can see the story of a James Blake unfolding for eight weeks."

Kantarian sells tennis's assets, which he said lend themselves to "today's culture - that combination of sport, celebrity and fashion". Well, it's a step forward in thinking anyway.